Earth and Air

by Janet Edwards

  “It’s true that Gradin’s arrogant and annoying,” I said, “but that doesn’t stop him being a hero as well. Valeska has been friends with Gradin for thirty years, so she knows exactly what he’s like. She’s seen him take risks to save her life, the lives of her team, and the lives of a lot of random strangers. Today, he flew into the radiation cloud to get the information the doctors needed to treat us.”

  “What?” Crozier’s eyes widened. “That radiation information came from Gradin’s survey plane?”

  I nodded.

  Crozier was frowning now. “Gradin said something about telling the Dig Site Federation that he’d destroyed another aircraft.”

  “Yes. Gradin was safely outside the radiation cloud, he could have just kept flying away and landed somewhere else, but he knew it was important to get full information on the radiation as quickly as possible. He started transmitting survey information to New York Main Dig Site Command, flew into the radiation cloud, set his survey plane to crash near the radiation source, and then jumped out.”

  “Jumped out?” For some odd reason, Crozier looked up at the ceiling. “He jumped out of an aircraft when it was way up in the air?”

  “That’s right. Gradin is arrogant, annoying, inconsiderate, and perpetually grumpy, but he’s also a hero.”

  I left Crozier thinking that over, walked across to the portal, and dialled the code of my Next Step. As soon as the portal flared to life, I stepped through into the foyer. The lighting was on low, so the standard, institutional, pale green walls looked even uglier than usual, but the familiarity of it was gloriously reassuring.

  Issette’s voice screamed from behind me. “Jarra, Jarra, Jarra, you’re back!”

  I turned to grin at her. “Why aren’t you in bed? It’s the middle of the night.”

  “I couldn’t go to bed until you were safely back. I told Keon he should wait up for you too, but he said that if he stayed up late every time you did something dangerous, then he’d never get any sleep at all.”

  I laughed. I was back at my Next Step, and as safe as anyone ever could be on this planet. I wouldn’t be staying safe though. In a week or two from now, I’d go back to New York Fringe.

  I had two dreams. One was to be an archaeologist. The other was to be a pilot. Both of those things involved an element of danger. Archaeologists braved the lethal hazards of the dig sites of Earth in search of the secrets of the past. Pilots were called on to fight forest fires and rescue people in trouble.

  I had two heroic examples to follow in Valeska and Gradin, but I knew it would be a mistake to try to model myself too closely on either of them. There was no hope of me ever becoming another Valeska, because both her skill and charm were unmatchable. I admired Gradin’s courage, and his brilliance as a pilot, but I’d no desire to copy his perpetual grumpiness.

  I could never succeed in turning myself into a copy of someone else anyway. Each person was different. We all had our own strengths. We all had our own weaknesses. I knew I would never be as brave as Valeska or Gradin. I hoped I would never be as cowardly as Felipe. I’d just have to try to become the best possible version of my frustrated, emotionally-confused, and trouble-prone self, and I’d decide what counted as the best possible version according to my rules rather than those set by the off-worlders on the main board of Hospital Earth.

  That reminded me of my last encounter with the baby hunter. I laughed again, and started eagerly telling Issette how I’d sent the off-worlder woman scurrying away from Earth. For once, I’d not just been angry at the off-worlders who dismissed me as less than human, I’d won a victory against them. It was only the smallest of victories, in a war that I’d be fighting all my life, but I’d stopped one baby hunter from harassing kids like me, and that was something to celebrate.

  Message from Janet Edwards

  Thank you for reading Earth and Air. This book is the second prequel novella featuring Jarra, the main character in the Earth Girl trilogy (Earth Girl, Earth Star, and Earth Flight). You can make sure you don’t miss future books in this and my other fictional universes by signing up to get new release updates at https://janetedwards.com/newsletter/

  Please visit me online at https://janetedwards.com/books/ to see the current full list of my books, including suggestions on the reading order.

  I’d like to thank Juliet Lai, Andrew Angel, Cindy Smith, James Walton, Alice Mercer, and Charlotte Staines for Beta reading Earth and Air. Any remaining problems are entirely my fault.

  Best wishes from Janet Edwards

  Books by Janet Edwards

  Set in the Hive Future

  The Hive Mind series:-

  PERILOUS: Hive Mind A Prequel Novella

  TELEPATH

  DEFENDER

  Set in the 25th Century of the Portal Future

  The Exodus series:-

  SCAVENGER ALLIANCE

  Set in the 28th Century of the Portal Future

  The prequel novellas:-

  EARTH AND FIRE: An Earth Girl Novella

  EARTH AND AIR: An Earth Girl Novella

  FRONTIER: An Epsilon Sector Novella

  The Earth Girl trilogy:-

  EARTH GIRL

  EARTH STAR

  EARTH FLIGHT

  The Earth Girl prequel short story collection:-

  EARTH 2788: The Earth Girl Short Stories

  Other short stories:-

  HERA 2781: A Military Short Story

  Set in the Game Future

  REAPER

  Please visit https://janetedwards.com/books/ to see the current full list of books.

  Make sure you don’t miss the next book by signing up to get new release updates at: https://janetedwards.com/newsletter/

  About the Author

  Janet Edwards lives in England. As a child, she read everything she could get her hands on, including a huge amount of science fiction and fantasy. She studied Maths at Oxford, and went on to suffer years of writing unbearably complicated technical documents before deciding to write something that was fun for a change. She has a husband, a son, a lot of books, and an aversion to housework.

  Visit Janet at her website: https://janetedwards.com/

  On Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/JanetEdwardsAuthor

  On Twitter: https://twitter.com/JanetEdwardsSF

  You can make sure you don’t miss the next book by signing up for email updates at: https://janetedwards.com/newsletter/

  A Glimpse of Frontier: An Earth Girl Novella

  June 2788. Amalie is the last unmarried girl in Jain’s Ford settlement. Life on a frontier farming planet in the twenty-eighth century has a few complications. The imported Earth animals and plants don’t always interact well with the local ecology, and there’s a shortage of doctors and teachers. The biggest problem though is the fact there are always more male than female colonists arriving from other worlds. Single men outnumber single women by ten to one, and girls are expected to marry at seventeen.

  Amalie turned seventeen six months ago, and she’s had nineteen perfectly respectable offers of marriage. Everyone is pressuring her to choose a husband, or possibly two of them. When Amalie’s given an unexpected chance of a totally different future, she’s tempted to take it, but then she gets her twentieth offer of marriage and it’s one she can’t possibly refuse.

  Frontier is the first novella in the Epsilon Sector Novella sequence featuring Amalie. Please note that most of the first two chapters of Frontier have appeared as the story Epsilon Sector 2788 in the EARTH 2788 short story collection. The other eighteen chapters are entirely new.

  Chapter One

  On the day after Cella’s wedding, I came close to skipping school for the first time in my life. If I’d done that, stayed home on that crucial afternoon, I’d probably never have been faced with a choice between two different lives.

  Even after I’d started walking down the track towards Lone Tree portal, I was tempted to turn round and go back home. Afternoon school shift started at one o’clock, and I w
as already late. Partly because I’d been babysitting my three youngest brothers and sisters all morning, partly because the water pipe from the spring needed unblocking for the third time this week, and partly because I’d heard the chickens squawking for help and had to go and rescue them from a moon monkey that was peering nosily into the chicken run. Moon monkeys were one of the original native species of Miranda, perfectly harmless herbivores, but our chickens were terrified of their round, glowing faces.

  These things were all just excuses, of course. The real reason I’d set off late for school was because I knew exactly what would happen when I got there. In fact, it started before I was anywhere near the school, because Torrin Summerhaze was lying in wait for me at the portal that was shared between the dozen nearest farms.

  It would take me an hour to walk to the next nearest portal, so I gritted my teeth and marched up to this one, pointedly avoiding eye contact with Torrin. That didn’t stop him happily jeering at me.

  “Old maid! Old maid! Amalie is the old maid!”

  I didn’t turn to look at him, just reached out with my right hand to slap him on the back of the head.

  “Ow!” he complained. “That hurt.”

  “It was meant to hurt.”

  I reached out to set the destination for the portal, but hesitated at the last moment. It was one of the economy models, just offering the six most important local destinations: Jain’s Ford Settlement Central, Jain’s Ford School, Mojay’s General Store, the livestock market, the vet, and the medical centre over at Falling Rock Settlement.

  If you wanted to go anywhere else, you had to portal to Settlement Central first. That had a proper portal you could use to travel anywhere on the inhabited continent of Miranda, though naturally the portalling charges were a lot higher. The only time I’d been through it was last year, when my parents took all eleven of us to visit Memorial. We’d seen the sea, and the hilltop monument marking where the Military handed Miranda over to the first colonists thirty-one years ago. It was a totally zan day, apart from the twins falling in a rock pool so they stank of seaweed.

  Right now, I felt like going to Settlement Central and portalling to Memorial again, or even all the way to Northern Reach. I’d seen images of the great cliffs there on the Miranda Rolling News channel. I could see those cliffs for myself, and have a glorious day of freedom, far away from Jain’s Ford Settlement, Jain’s Ford School, and people like Torrin Summerhaze. The snag was that I’d have to come back and face them all at the end of it. I’d have spent credits I couldn’t afford, and it would change nothing.

  I set the destination to the school, and walked through the second the portal established. I stepped out of the portal in the school field, and headed for the nearest of the six grey flexiplas domes, the one that was labelled with a large white number 6 and a lopsided pink hummingbird.

  The number 6 was the official school dome label. The pink hummingbird was a legacy of when the boys in the year above us got drunk on their last day at school and found a stray can of paint. Rodrish Jain had climbed onto the dome roof to finish painting the hummingbird’s wings, stopped in the middle to shout and wave at the rest of us, fell off, and was portalled to the medical centre at Falling Rock with a broken arm. There was a rumour that Doc Jumi had fixed Rodrish’s arm, and then locked him in quarantine for twenty-four hours in case his pink spots were a sign of a previously undiscovered Mirandan disease. It was probably true. Doc Jumi had an evil sense of humour.

  Torrin came through the portal and chased after me. “Amalie, I could help you solve your problem. Marry me!”

  I stopped walking, looked him up and down, shook my head sadly, and gave him the standard frontier planet rejection line. “Come back when you’ve got a farm!”

  He sighed, and trailed along after me to dome 6. As we went inside, twenty boys looked at me, stood up, and yelled it in unison. “Old maid! Old maid! Amalie is the old maid!”

  Last year, there’d been twenty-one boys and eighteen girls in our class. Here on Miranda, as on most of the planets in Epsilon sector, you could have Twoing contracts at 16 and marry at 17. On Year Day 2788, we’d all turned 17, and seven of the girls instantly proved themselves perfect frontier world women by having Year Day weddings. Admittedly, in Rina’s case, there was a scandal over her last minute change of husband.

  Norris was still fuming about that, and you could hardly blame him. He’d been Twoing with Rina for ten months, so when she dumped him in the middle of their wedding and married another man it was a shock for everyone. The fact the other man was Norris’s older brother, made things even worse. Jain’s Ford Settlement was pretty equally divided between those who thought Rina had done the right thing, those who thought she should have stuck with Norris, and those who thought she should have married both of them. I was the exception. I thought it would have been much more sensible for Rina to cancel the wedding, and think things over for a few weeks before she married anyone, but it was her life, not mine.

  Over the next three months, nine of the other girls had got married as well, though without any more scandals. My friend, Cella, had held out for a further two months before caving into social pressure and marrying yesterday. Now there were twenty-one boys, seventeen empty desks, and me. I was the class old maid. Worse than that, I was the settlement old maid, because all the girls my age who’d left school at 15 were married as well.

  Frontier, an Earth Girl prequel novella featuring Amalie, is available now in both ebook and paperback editions. You can find full details at https://janetedwards.com/books/frontier/